


Winter Swoldier

by iarrannme, SweetInsanityArts



Series: Winter Fables [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Fame, Fans, Friendship, Gen, Humor, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Parody, Past Brainwashing, Resilience, Therapy, Trolling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:14:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22199170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iarrannme/pseuds/iarrannme, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetInsanityArts/pseuds/SweetInsanityArts
Summary: What ifMen’s Healthalso existed in the MCU, and tried to interview Bucky Barnes?  Or, troll!Bucky and serious!Bucky have some opinions.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Avengers Team, James "Bucky" Barnes & Ayo, James "Bucky" Barnes & Original Character(s), James "Bucky" Barnes & Sam Wilson, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Winter Fables [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1546102
Comments: 27
Kudos: 111
Collections: Bucky, Bucky Barnes, Bucky and or winter soldier centric, Queer Characters Collection





	1. First attempt

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [How Sebastian Stan Went From Winter Soldier to 'Winter Swoldier'](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/549445) by Lauren Larson. 



> “The First Attempt” and “Postscript” are my writing. “The Second Attempt” is nearly exactly the actual article, altered to take place in the MCU and with a greater focus on mental health. You don't have to read the actual article first, though some of the humor comes from how I twisted it.
> 
> Art for this story by [SweetInsanityArts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetInsanityArts/works).

“Our readers would _love_ to know how you got those muscles, Sergeant Barnes.” The _Men’s Health_ reporter smiled invitingly. “We could do a whole _spread_.”

Steve didn’t need Sam grabbing the back of his shirt to keep from interfering. He’d seen the minute eyelid-dip that was the only sign of the flat look Bucky almost gave the reporter after the first bit. As for the second, well, people kept acting like no one back in the Olden Days had known what sex was or that fellas could want fellas. The cool smile Bucky was giving the reporter now was all the evidence Steve needed that Bucky could handle the guy himself.

“Well,” said Bucky, the image of polite helpfulness, “first, they need to have grown up not having always had enough food. Having a variety of manual-labor jobs helps, to work those different muscle groups. Then they should spend years at war, carrying around all the equipment they need and again not always getting enough to eat, and usually at risk of attack – constant muscle tension does wonders for toning abs and shoulders.

“After that, it’s simple. Get captured by HYDRA, subjected to medical torture including being shot full of unidentified experimental drugs – but the right ones, mind – get rescued, do the war thing some more, then fall from a moving train onto sharp rocks in the mountains in the middle of winter, get your arm chopped off and replaced with something heavy – gives you that constant resistance exercise to maintain basic posture, of course it also does a number on your spine and leads to all kinds of chronic pain ’til you can get it replaced with a better model years later so, you know, that part might not be for everybody – and get put through a forced brainwashing and physical conditioning program to turn you into an assassin, during which insufficient effort will lead to torture and having your mind wiped.” Bucky paused and looked away, pursing his lips and tapping a finger against his mouth thoughtfully. Then he looked back at the reporter and smiled brightly. “I think that’s about it.”

There were no further questions.


	2. Second attempt: Cover art

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cover art by SweetInsanityArts.


	3. Second attempt: Article

By Lauryn Larsen

The coffee-shop staff is having a silent meltdown. The peppermint tea I ordered was forgotten as soon as Bucky Barnes – the Winter Soldier – walked in. He orders a coffee, receives it instantly, and goes to put it down on a table. The lid isn’t fully on, and the coffee spills. It’s almost a “the Avengers are just like us” moment, but then a barista suddenly materializes with a paper towel in his outstretched palm. “It’s wet,” he squeaks, and I can’t tell if he’s awed or afraid. It won’t be the last time people react to Barnes that way.

Barnes, whose age no one seems sure of – do years in cryofreeze count? – is wearing black shorts, a black T-shirt, midcalf black socks, and a gray hoodie missing its drawstring. He looks very off-duty SoHo, which he is: He’s back home in New York City on furlough from training to work with Sam Wilson – former Falcon, now the new Captain America – and the other remaining Avengers. It’s a collaboration of extravagantly talented individuals, who apparently unwind from training by watching Disney flicks together. “Bambi had a lot of tactical insights,” says Barnes, deadpan, when I ask. It’s only the first of many times I suspect him of trolling.

He’s also wearing a blue baseball cap, which sits slightly higher on his head than it might on the head of someone with less va-va-voom hair. That hair sent the Internet into a tizzy recently, when a shot of the Avengers in action showed Barnes with a short cut. In the past, when he was the Winter Soldier and for some years after, he’s had shoulder-length hair. Next to his forehead, which is giant—the White Cliffs of Dover of foreheads—the longer style made him look very sinister.

With his metal arm covered, Barnes is somewhat less recognizable in street clothes, but people still side-eye him on their way to the bathroom. Maybe they recognize him; maybe he’s just a little too strapping not to be famous. He doesn’t like the attention – “spent way too long hiding” – but knows it comes with being an Avenger.

As Barnes talks, he maintains an unsettling deadpan, verging on a glower. “People always ask me if I’m okay,” he says, still glowering. “They’ve said I have ‘assassin resting face.’ No matter what I do, I’ve always had dark circles under my eyes that never really go away. Lately there might be a little moisturizer happening here and there, just in case. Preserving a couple years, or whatever.” I think about the incongruity of an assassin – ok, ex-assassin, but still – moisturizing his dark under-eye circles, or a man who spent years in cryo worrying about preserving a couple, but I don’t ask, because if he’s trolling then I lose the game, and if he’s not then I might lose my mind.

The more reserved the Avenger, the more likely he is to become part of popular mythology. Barnes’s very existence was kept secret for years, even after the Avengers found out about him in 2014; he didn’t enter popular consciousness until 2016, when he was framed for the assassination of King T’Chaka of Wakanda. Barnes doesn’t like to talk about his past – neither the decades as the Winter Soldier nor those first two years of precarious, hidden freedom – but doing so at least in general terms is the reason he finally agreed to this interview, after emphatically refusing most such overtures (including a previous one from another reporter at this magazine).

He has no interest in rehashing the torture and trauma he’s now famous for having survived and seems at best bemused and irritated by the fame – a different reaction, one suspects, than one would have gotten out of the Bucky Barnes caught laughing in that famous Smithsonian video. Barnes can still be a charmer when he wants to be, but it’s no longer his default. He’s only gritting his teeth and giving in to a certain amount of public sharing because, he says, “what with alien attacks and supervillains and fuckin’ Thanos and all, it’s been a rough decade-plus for everybody, and I know a hell of a lot about surviving and putting myself back together. When Steve and I were growing up there wasn’t any such thing as therapy – or only for rich people and you kept it secret – and guys especially weren’t gonna admit anything bothered ’em. So they’d just drink and hit their wives and kids if it got to be too much. I’m puttin’ it out there: I’ve been seeing a shrink. It’s not a magic cure but it helps enough I keep going. I’m hoping maybe some knuckleheads will be like ‘oh, well, if a fuckin’ assassin with a metal arm can go to therapy, maybe I can too.’”

He’s not above using his physique to emphasize his point that even the manliest of manly men can survive occasionally talking about feelings. I ask him about the rumor – based on admittedly iffy imagery purportedly from 2014 vs. 2016 – that he got even more ripped in his two years on the run than he had been as the spy world’s bogeyman. Redditors have dubbed the post-2016 version of him “the Winter Swoldier” and “Bulky Barnes.” He rolls his eyes but acknowledges it’s true. “I’d been made a tool,” he says. “My body didn’t belong to me for so long. Part of taking it back, for me, involved a hell of a lot of exercise. It’s one of the reasons I asked the Wakandans to make me a new arm. I’d actually gotten too big for the old prosthetic, and it was too heavy anyway. Balance was off, did weird things to my body language.”

Barnes is not a new arrival on the world stage, merely new to being an acknowledged presence. But recently he’s enjoyed a burgeoning late-term fandom as his role on the Avengers has become more vital with Iron Man’s death and the original Captain America’s disappearance (which Barnes refuses to discuss). He’s trying to be more than, as he puts it, “Captain America’s – Steve’s – jackass ex-assassin boyfriend.” When we meet in October, he’s just returned from training with Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), Wanda Maximoff, Sam Wilson, and King T’Challa. Another insecurity-inspiring roster.

With Barnes’s constellation of anxieties—he says he’s “terribly self-aware, to the point of detriment”—he is uniquely suited to stardom post-Decimation. A decade-plus ago, the public wanted Avengers to be pillars of hubris, strutting around in robot suits, muscly and impenetrable; we needed to believe someone could scorn the Chitauri. Now that Thanos has brought our constant vulnerability home to all of us so brutally, we still want the muscles, but we also want our protectors to be genuine – because we know they may not be able to save us from everything, but we’ve got to believe they’re the kind of people who will try.

The Avengers’ lives can seem at odds with that national craving for authenticity. Steve Rogers, for example, became Captain America instantly: He went into a machine and emerged fit, huge, and self-actualized. I ask Barnes whether that narrative—man gets muscles and immediately earns the admiration and attraction of everyone in his midst—isn’t a dated, unrelatable picture of masculinity.

Barnes laughs. “You’ve been watching too many propaganda films,” he says. “Steve had no experience as an officer or even a soldier beyond the basic training he could hardly get through before the serum. He had the heart and he got the body instantly, I’ll give you that, but he grew into the role and the admiration he earned slower than that. Colonel Phillips and the Howlies and I taught him everything he actually knew about fighting as a team, leading a unit – when he earned everyone’s respect, it wasn’t because of his muscles. It was because of everything on the inside.

“I saw Steve Rogers question his identity, his alliances, the government. ‘Who am I? What is this? What made me come into this is very different than the role I am in now.’ I saw his character evolve. Then he gave up his shield and was like, ‘I’m out. I’m going to do my own thing.’ He chose his own life. It’s actually more relatable.” He lets me see a flash of a wicked grin. “ _I_ sure got more of a relationship out of him, anyway.” He sobers. “For a long time I blamed T- I blamed someone who was a dick to him about the shield not being his. But it was always Steve’s choice to drop it.” He gets a distant look for a moment, but when I raise an eyebrow, he banishes it. Whatever he just reminded himself of, he’s not sharing.

There’s an obvious metaphor there: Barnes is Captain America, and stardom—and the press, the scrutiny, and the training that come with it—is his government, always invading his carefully fortified sense of self. (Not to mention the actual government, whose opinion on the ex-assassin POW’s presence and actions while under mind control Barnes declines to address.) As a result, he can appear very reticent in public, offering only occasional glimpses of the unguarded Bucky Barnes. Fans live for those moments.

Barnes is the anti-celebrity in the year of the anti-celebrity.

And his ambient hostility toward questioning is offset by the behavior of Sam Wilson – Falcon, now Captain America. When alone in interviews, Barnes can seem deflective and bored, but he gets an enormous kick out of Wilson, who has jumped in to rescue many an interviewer left to writhe on the hook by Barnes. (Not, so far, literally.) He is the Bucky Barnes whisperer, midwife to a charm that can be difficult to coax out.

“When I’m trying hard to find the honest moment, he sort of unlocks me a little bit. We both laugh and we find a way to have a good time,” Barnes says. When I tell him that I’m planning to mine Wilson for gossip, he laughs. “Here’s what he’s going to say: ‘He’s way too serious. It’s boring. He slows everything down. It’s always these questions and, like, the stare. Give this kid a Yoo-hoo! Somebody get him a chocolate milk. Good God, put a smile on his face!’”

Wilson is the enthusiastic extrovert to Barnes’s pensive recluse. Even though I reach him on the phone at 9:00 p.m. after a long day of shooting in Savannah—he won’t say more, though Hunter Army Air Field there has training as part of its mission—he’s forthcoming about Barnes. He describes his fellow Avenger as a hermit, a chronic Irish-goodbye-er who doesn’t offer much of himself at first. “You shoulda seen Everett Ross trying to get anything out of him, he was in very big trouble,” Wilson says. “Bucky has resting bitch face nailed 100 percent.”

His first impression, which lingered for a long time, was that Barnes was “the kind of person you stop, not the kind you save.” They fought when they met, though out of respect for Barnes’s mental state at the time – he was still the Winter Soldier – and their friendship now, he won’t say more, just that it wasn’t a buddy-com bromance at first sight. It wasn’t until much later, when the two were on the run after Barnes was framed, that they hit it off. Wilson went AWOL with Barnes and Rogers, who “unlocked” Barnes for Wilson the same way Wilson now unlocks Barnes on press tours.

Their chemistry also plays well in the field. They share a dedication to their work, and they both come from military backgrounds. (“He went through pararescue training,” Barnes says of Wilson. “He can do anything Steve could do, only slower. And stuff Steve couldn’t do.”) Beyond that, they’re opposites, reining in each other’s moods to a perfect, workable middle. “He calms me down when I’m ready to rage against the machine,” Wilson says. In turn, Wilson bullies Barnes into having fun.

Case in point: When they were fighting dinosaurs in Beijing, they had one of those endless nights that make fighting dinosaurs seem glamorous. “It just went on and on and on,” Wilson recalls. “We had to do press the next morning, and he’s like, ‘I’m going to bed.’ I’m like, ‘Nope.’ I took his wallet and his cell phone so he couldn’t get into his hotel room. Then, by the time we got to the press, I was fine. He just looked like he’d gotten hit by a T-Rex.”

The public has always relished superhero partnerships—from the OG six who saved New York to the expanded team who took down Thanos—but now more than ever, buddying up feels like an imperative. Teams perform, especially on social media. In November, when Barnes and Wilson took over the Avengers’ Instagram to announce that they’d begun working together, fans were as thirsty for their friendship as they were for the show. Their dynamic is the stuff of memes: “[I] want someone to look at me the way Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson look at each other,” one fan tweeted.

I know what that fan meant. When Barnes does look at you without suspicion—when, perchance, he laughs at something you say—it’s like winning a battle.

When it comes to mental health (“C’mon, your readers should be totally down for this, all they gotta do is stick a little ‘tal’ in the middle of your name”), Barnes has also benefited from the influence of a thoughtful spirit guide. He grew up going to church, but he didn’t start seriously pondering his mind and soul until he was hiding from HYDRA and the world in a tiny apartment in Bucharest. And he didn’t get really into finding his Zen until 2016, when he made a covenant with Steve Rogers and the Wakandans which he calls “really classic. It was that age-old tale of ‘it’s not you, it’s me, because I can be turned into a murderbot by anyone who gets close enough to spout some triggers at me, and I just don’t think I can be in a healthy relationship like that.’ So the Wakandans promised to fix the worst of the physical brain damage and triggers while I was in cryo, and I promised to work with their therapists to fix the rest when I got out, and Steve promised to give me the space I needed to get better but not to be a stranger. I felt like I was finally ready to run towards something instead of running away.”

Really classic, indeed: the covenant also included plans for managing Barnes should treatment be unsuccessful, whether that meant a momentary lapse into “murderbot” or a more permanent failure. He doesn’t want to discuss specifics, but acknowledges it was a relief to know T’Challa and the Dora Milaje were around: if Barnes went off the rails, he wouldn’t be the only one endowed with superlative training, supernatural gifts and sick abs.

“I got out of cryo,” Barnes says. “And one of the therapists said to me, ‘Look, Shuri’s tech gave you a healthy start, but life is about more than staying alive.’ Waking up knowing those triggers were gone – it’s ridiculous how good that felt. I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I started to work with the therapists – they call ’em integrationists there, but it was Sam who really got me into it. It’s a very holistic mind-body approach.” With the integrationists and Wilson as his shepherds, Barnes began exercising mind and body in earnest.

Then, in 2018, ahead of Thanos’s first incursion, Barnes teamed up with trainer Ayo, who sculpts Dora Milaje recruits into experienced warriors; he says they learned a lot from one another. That same year, he got his first taste of worldwide adulation when pictures of Captain America’s visit to Wakanda got leaked, and headlines about “CAP’S HAWT MAN” overtook faked-up shots of King T’Chaka’s assassination in his Google results. He says he’d never before been defined by his hotness.

“It taught me something very important about vanity and how people are perceived in terms of being quote-unquote good-looking, beautiful, or pretty,” Barnes says. “It almost feels like there’s something shameful and dirty about it. Our obsession with beauty has not changed in my lifetime. When we see something that turns us on, we either appreciate it or judge it. It’s so primal. We still dismiss people if they’re pretty; we don’t care how they feel, because they should just be happy looking the way they do. That’s something I had to get past to accept that my mental health mattered and was worth doing something about.” Barnes isn’t always philosophical, though. “People see the Avengers get in a fight and there’s always the ones that instead of running they whip out their phones and start filming. I’d spent decades trained and conditioned to be a ghost, to kill anyone who spotted me at all, much less got proof. But an Avenger stopping fighting the bad guys to go murder a civilian for filming him is, you know, it’s a bad look,” he says. “I really zoned in on changing my programmed reactions, and everything transformed.”

He prefers doing mind-body work on an empty stomach – “they used to withhold food as part of my conditioning, so it feels familiar but now it’s under _my_ control, I know, it’s weird, I gotta work on it” – so he generally starts his day with coffee—and a rice cake with some almond butter and honey if he’s feeling depleted. Today he was feeling _very_ depleted, he says, so he had some scrambled eggs with Brussels sprouts and aioli. “I’m not going to tell you the place where I got that,” he adds, unprompted and wary, as though I might start dining there daily in a stalker vigil.

Barnes is a proponent of “quality over quantity,” but that doesn’t mean he skimps on his treatments; he just knows that a 20-minute session that “works through my issues enough to really get my heartrate up” is as effective as an hour of low-intensity bullshit. He runs (“I’m not going to tell you where”) when he’s feeling meditative.

In advance of working more full-time with the remaining Avengers, Barnes started lifting weights every morning and returned temporarily to Wakanda to continue his fight training with the Dora Milaje. He points out that Avengers-level fights are a workout in themselves: You spend whole days running around and sweating in a heavy suit. “I mean, next to Cap and Thor and all those guys, I feel like I’m 50 miles behind. I don’t think I can get to that size, to be honest,” he says. That aside, Barnes feels, whatever age he might technically be, better than ever. “My mind and body right now are probably the best they’ve ever been.”

There’s video of Barnes, age 26, in the Smithsonian. He’s laughing with Captain America. He’s recognizable physically, but that carefree young man can hardly be reconciled with the intensity he radiates now.

Barnes lived in Brooklyn until he enlisted. Shortly after Sarah Rogers’s death, he and his scrawny, now-orphaned best friend Steve moved to an apartment and stayed there for a few years before he headed to basic training. No, he says, he didn’t have a jock’s social cachet in middle school. “Maybe if I played football or something. But I did boxing, to get better at protecting Steve. We left a trail of blood, but that was pretty much all from his nose,” he says. “His heart was always in the right place, but sometimes I just wanted a day without having to rescue him from someone twice our size.”

I ask Barnes which of his mannerisms are typically 1930s. “You’re kind of putting me on the spot to define a whole generation—a guy who’s been out of sync with them for years,” he says. But he thinks for a second. “For me, based on my mother, the ‘Great Depression temperament’ is perseverance—being able to handle more than you think you can. At 27, my mother was working two jobs in a country where she couldn’t always afford enough food to feed her kids. There’s a sense of family and perseverance that’s deeply ingrained in the blood.”

Even for someone who has experienced a certain degree of stardom – though Barnes points out the Howling Commandos’ reputation is much greater now than at the time, when their style of warfare was considered ungentlemanly – Avengers fans can be a shock to one’s sense of family. Certain Avengers acquiesce to the attention on some level, greeting fans with a Thor-like openness to scrutiny. Barnes’s boundaries are reflexive and firm, as though his sense of self is always under attack. (Which, to be fair, it may well be: “He’s so reserved,” Wilson says, “but in this day and age that’s a very good quality.”)

Barnes is more protective of his personal life than most Avengers. Celebrities often use social media to dispense calculated chunks of themselves in exchange for privacy. Barnes occasionally opens up on Instagram: “Been working with my pals through years of self judgement and mental wars when it comes to fitness and LIFE,” he wrote of his integrationist (who chose anonymity), Ayo and Wilson in a caption accompanying a gym selfie. But questions about the people in his orbit ping ineffectually against his poker face.

He attributes this to only-vaguely-alluded-to incidents in which his family and friends were subject to public and bad-guy attention. As an Avenger, he has opted into that attention, he explains, but other than his fellow Avengers, they haven’t. It upset him when they were the targets of scrutiny, particularly when that scrutiny came from the remnants of HYDRA. Barnes seems to be looking for earnestness in a world that, on the whole, disdains earnestness. He “tries hard to find the honest moment,” as he himself puts it (much like how he saw a profound statement about “our obsession with beauty” in horny headlines about Cap’s boyfriend).

In this, the Avengers are an improbably good fit for him. We speak the week after Martin Scorsese said the Avengers “are not heroes, they’re just cinema” and Barnes is as defensive of the Avengers as he can be without disrespecting Scorsese, whose work he admires. “All I know is that our work affects people,” he says. “I’ve certainly experienced firsthand many people who have been affected and helped by the Avengers. _I_ have been, and while it’s none of my business whether Mr. Scorsese was Snapped, he certainly at least lost people he cared about that way, and got them back thanks to the Avengers.”

Avengers fans lean earnest. People have told Barnes that he helped them cope with their PTSD. During Q&A sessions, he’s asked questions like “What would your major be if you went to college?” and “What happened when you fell from the train?” Barnes fields those questions without sarcasm or diversion, though he doesn’t always answer the ones about particularly painful times.

“They’re trying to see themselves in us,” Barnes says, again without condescension. He’s content to take questions about Bucky Barnes, especially the young version thereof, extra-especially if it distracts fans from asking questions about the Winter Soldier. “Now we’re much more obsessed with the personality rather than the role – NCOIC or whatever. We take people and swallow them and digest them and chew them up, and then we spit them out the other side. Then we’re done,” he says. “We’ve done that with numerous celebrities—people. I’ve seen people have massive ups and downs and stuff. All I can do is just try to be as honest as I can. And do my job.”

## Postscript

_Sergeant Barnes – Please accept my apologies for the cover headline! I got overruled. – Lauryn_

_Lauryn – Your editors thinking that “work out to look like a brainwashed assassin” would sell magazines is not the most horrifying thing I’ve dealt with this week. (That’d be Wilson’s BO after a day in the suit.) Regards – Bucky_


	4. Photo shoot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The photo shoot of the Winter Swoldier workout: art by SweetInsanityArts.

Bucky Barnes and stuffed dino Steviesaurus Rex. Yoga pants, $5, unknown brand ethically sourced from thrift store. Photo credit: Jones & Parker.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it! No further text or art expected for this work, but if you've enjoyed this please subscribe to us directly (click on our names and then subscribe from there). Thank you and stay healthy!


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